The Chorus
By Rachel Hadas
A Greek I worked for once would always say
that tragedies which still appall and thrill
happen daily on a village scale.
Except that he put it the other way:
dark doings in the sleepiest small town
loom dire and histrionic as a play.
Cosmic? Perhaps. Unprecedented? Not
to the old women sitting in the sun,
the old men planted in cafes till noon
or midnight taking in the human scene,
connoisseurs of past-passing-and-to-come.
These watchers locate in their repertory
mythic fragments of some kindred story
and draw them dripping out of memory’s well.
Incest and adultery; exile
and murder; divine punishment; disgrace:
the trick is to locate the right-sized piece
of the vast puzzle-patterned tapestry
from which one ripped-out patch makes tragedy.
This highly skilled and patient process—find
a larger context, match and patch and mend—
is what the chorus in Greek tragedy
has always done. And to this very day
spectators comb the tangles of a tale,
compare, remember, comment—not ideal,
but middle-aged or older, and alert.
Beyond the hero’s rashness or the hurt
heart of the heroine, they’ve reached the age
when only stars still lust for center stage.
The chorus, at a point midway between
the limelight and the audience, is seen
and unseen. Lady chaperones at balls
once sat on brittle chairs against the walls.
“My dancing days are over,” they’d both sigh
and smile. Or take the case of poetry.
Mine used to play the heroine—me me me—
but lately, having had its fill of “I,”
tries to discern, despite its vision’s flaws,
a shape. A piece of myth. A pattern. Laws.
Copyright Credit: Rachel Hadas, “The Chorus” from Laws. Copyright © 2004 by Rachel Hadas. Reprinted with the permission of Zoo Press.
Source: Laws (Zoo Press, 2004)